Just a quick note.
Here’s the main thing to keep in mind. Let’s start with the ‘physical brain’. There are a bazillion little modules in it, neural pathways, some from birth and some shaped by culture. Each little ‘module has ‘free will’, and it adds it’s ‘unique voice’ to the massive interplay of things executing in the brain. All these modules ‘tussle’ to cause the
‘action potential’ to reach the level of action. This is just basic neurology.
From that purely physicalist, reductionist standpoint, it’s obvious that THERE CAN BE NO FREE WILL, at the level of the ‘ego’ of the left brain hemisphere anyway.
The truth here, is that decisions are made before we know it, and only after the fact are we aware that ‘we’ ‘chose’. This has been known since at least since Antony Libet in the early 1980’s and many researchers since then.
Now this is just the physicalist, reductionist and neurological explanation and it is quite compelling.
You can also go with deterministic models of physics, whereby one might ponder that if they knew the original conditions of the early Universe, that it might be possible to know whether you will have a ham sandwich or a roast beef sandwich, on August 1st of some year or not.
Now in that case, people will bring up quantum theory, and chaos theory and what not, and claim that couldn’t actually be done.
But if you view the Universe in a block universe manner philosophically, it doesn’t’ matter what’s ‘classical’ and what’s ‘quantum’ or ‘chaotic’, from that standpoint everything seems deterministic before ‘time’ even began.
When confronted with this, a lot of people get melancholy, thinking that their one little voice doesn’t matter.
This is not true of course.
But one does need to understand Platonic Surrealism to untangle the knots in this ancient epistemological and ontological controversy.
This little essay only examines the physicalist argument, that is utterly persuasive.
The Platonic Surrealistic treatment of this topic continues from this point, in another essay.
Kevin Cann
9/25/2024